Titan Quest

 

Titan Quest came out in 2006 and is among one of the early Diablo type clones out there. I had only tried it breifly once before but felt like it would be more appropriate and more fun to get through if I waited until I could play through it co-op so eventually that time rolled around.

The co-op here works simple enough, the host creates his own game and then the friend can join through Steam. You can see your partner on the map with a green dot so its easy to find eachother. You can also lay a portal at anytime for eachother to instantly warp to. The game doesnt have much of an intro, theres a brief intro cinematic showing a few slides of images with some vague backstory about ancient Greece and then youre plopped into the world to go about completing the Main quest. The graphics and gameplay style is very much so copying and inspired by Diablo. Its an isometric Action Role Playing game where you move by holding the mouse button and clicking enemies. You can fortunately hold the mouse button to both keep moving and automatically attacking enemies.  You start by just wandering around this open field area with a few small villages and NPC's and you get a quest update for the main quest. The game is rather vague about how to progress the main quest, it will usually give you some sort of hint that youre suppose to kill some monster or travel to some area, but beyond that youre left with basically no idea of what you're suppose to be doing. So for the first quarter or even half of the game we were kinda just wandering around randomly until it would progress the main quest. We eventually learned that almost always travelling North on the map gives you progress towards the main quest. The map is huge, and most of the game takes place in giant sprawling outdoors areas with dozens upon dozens of enemies. Theres also frequently optional caves you can enter, but the game doesnt do a good, or even consistent job of letting the player know which areas are optional and which ones are mandatory. Usually it will say things like 'Natural cave' and 9 out of 10 times its an optional cave, but one time its mandatory, stuff like that. The game has a real problem with pacing, direction, and consistency in its goals and objectives and informing the player of what they're supposed to be doing or how to make progress.

It's an ARPG so of course one of the most important things is going to be the items, loot, and how satisfying the combat is. Well Titan Quest is pretty satisfying in this regard. The combat is very minimalistic and simplistic, but somehow its really satisfying and never really felt like the weak part of the game. There is no character selection at the beginning of the game, but once you start a character you get the option to pick a class. Theres about a dozen or so. Things like a typical Warrior (Warfare tree), Hunter, but then lots of other more fantasy stuff like Dream, Earth, Storm, Nature, etc. I just wanted to pick the most generic, basic, minimalist Physical damage warrior guy so i picked Warfare and tried to keep it as down to earth as possible, and luckily Titan Quest seemed to reward that decision. It's not one of those overly complex mindfuck ARPGS that requires you to spend hours reading google or walkthrough guides to get a character going, no, it rewards and allows you to play the game blind, experiment because shortly into the game you meet NPC's that let you respec your skills, and most of the interface, UI, and skill design is intuitive and makes sense.  The warfare tree skill system that I played has a few basic, but complex enough and satisfying skills and decisions. There are skills that grant Area of Attack (AOE) such as War Wind, which similar to Diablo 2's Whirlwind, lets you spin around in a circle attacking any nearby enemies for a brief moment then is put on a cooldown. This was my go-to secondary skill for the whole game. Then, another skill Onslaught replaces your primary attack for a basic attack which buffs your character up the more you hit an enemy. 

 

These 2 skills sufficed for most of the playthrough. There are also a lot of Passive skills, that I eventually realized were noted by more circular design instead of the skills being squares, the passive skills are intuitive just things like %attack speed, or the very useful Lacerate which added larger AOE and bleed damage to my War Wind. Beyond those, you also have these fun to use temporary buffs like the various Horns and Flag banners. I opted to use the Battle Standard, which drops a flag on the ground temporarily buffing everyone around you and debuffing enemies, while my co-op parter used War Horn, which stuns all the enemies around you for a brief moment and also debuffs them. These skills were satisfying to use because it always felt impactful and good when the War Horn would go off and suddenly turn a horn of enemies into terrified weaklings just instatantly stunned stnading there while we wailed on them to death. Also, the enemies have ragdoll corpse physics so when you kill them they flop to the ground in a fun and satisfying manner, and even depending how hard you hit them and how much damage you do the force gets translated to the ragdoll physics which makes it even more fun and giving the player feedback showing just how impactful you are. As for the other trees, I cant really comment on. At about level 8 you get the option of choosing a second skill tree, you dont have to so for most of the game I simply didnt. I eventually almost ran out of skills to put into the Warfare tree so I picked the other most minimalist physical based generic warrior tree - Defense. This was a whole other tree to explore based on shields and defense, but i Just dumped all my points into the Mastery which gives you easy stats like Strength, Dex, health, which seemed to work just fine. So overall, the skill trees are deep enough to give you a lot of thought and thinking required to where its not trivial and youll be constantly planing ahead your next step and always working towards some goal and keeping you excited to level to get that next point, but theyre not so ridiculously complex, something like Path of Exile, that it makes the whole experience daunting and tedious to get through. So I say good job on that front.

The itemization in the game is impressive for the most part too. While its disappointing that theres no 2 hand options like big swords and axes, you have a decent variety of weapons in the form of Axes, Maces, Swords, Spears. And the other class specific stuff like Staves, Bows etc. You have equipment slots for typical things like body armor, helmet, boots, shield, amulet and 2 rings. The whole time we had an empty slot in the bottom left which is, apparently, for Relics, which is this whole system about putting these recipes into a NPC and completing the recipe with these collectible items like Charms and it gives you a Relic but unfortunately we never got to complete one. The actual stats themselves are very much inspired and lifted from Diablo 2. Theres standard stuff like weapon damages like 3-12. But theres also a lot of other stats you have to think about and consider. I found items with +To all skills,  +to specific skill trees, Attack speed%, +to Defensive and Offensive abilitiy which is this whole specific combat system that determines how well your accuracy is and other things, Life leech, Movement speed, % damage to specific monsters like Undead or Beasts. Basically, theres an impressive amount of things to consider when equipping or upgrading gear. There is a "DPS" part of the interface that seems to combine multiple things together like Attack speed, weapon damage etc, I mostly relied on that for the whole game but still its not the end all-be-all you have to consider the other stats as well. The items drop with different colors and rarities so like White is the most common and worst, Yellow is rarer, then im not exactly sure about the others but anytime we saw a Blue, Green, or Darker blue we both paid close attention because these were uncommon rare items and usually had interesting stats and it was always exciting to find these, they dropped fairly frequently towards the half point of the game so the loot stayed exciting for most of the game. Its also nice that it makes an alarming sound effect when the item drops, too.
The health potions work very simple, you dont have a belt with limited slots like Diablo, you can simply buy as many health potions at once as you want and they stack into one slot. For most of the game I'd just walk around with 100+ potions readily available, making healing trivial. I always had much more gold than I needed to buy hundreds of potions, it was never a problem. I guess this is both a positive and negative. On the one hand it helps you get back to constant action without downtime, but on the other it makes healing entirely trivial and you never have these tense stressful moments where you need to be careful of how many potions youre carrying to make room for loot, and you also have infinite town portals at the press of a button so you can at anytime instantly return to town to grab more.

The graphics, despite the game being from 2006, still hold up and have a lot of visually appealing moments. Everything is fully 3d modelled, its not artistic sprites like older ARPGS, the water graphics in particular look nice, and the game even has a full day and night cycle which helps break up some of the monotony because the game takes place largely outdoors. Most of the game takes place in these open fields, its very yellow as a lot of it is sandy almost desert areas. But the actual graphical fidelity is decent for what it is. Particularly the enemy models and textures, you can zoom the camera right in and the models and textures of the various enemies are impressive and interesting to look at. The music for the most part is pretty great, a lot of like Dark Ambient swirling music but also some calming flute music, the game has a kind of constant droning ambience to the soundtrack that I thought was particularly well done. Though, the voice acting is largely shit, like just annoying. Everyone talking is so overly acted and over exaggerated it comes across as some narrative from a kids show or a Disney movie or something, the voice acting is just awful. Like not even "so bad its good" - I didnt' even want to listen to it most of the time because it just sucks. Which means I basically missed the entire plot, but you know what I get the idea anyway. Yeah its some ancient Greek mythology game youre going around fighting the evil oppressive gods or whatever, Cool, I don't really need the intricate details, but it was cool seeing all the various references to Greek mythology and figures that I'm vaguely aware of.

Sadly the game has a lot of drawbacks. The biggest one is the pacing. Much of the game is just plainly uneventful. You go through field, after field, after field of the same looking grassy flat areas fighting waves of copy paste monsters with not much in between. Sometimes you go through a cave, or rarely this building type environment but its few and far between. The game barely has any significant memorable boss fights. There are frequent mini-boss type enemies, indicated by having a star above their head, these definitely help break up the monotony but the boss fights kind of just turn into this war of attrition where you spam health potions and just stand in place wacking the boss for 10 minutes as his healthy slowly goes down but you're out-healing his damage. You come across one of these minibosses once every 20 minutes or so. They're usually just reskins of monsters youre already fighting but with big health bars. As for the main quest bosses, theres a handful of them but nothing super memorable. Usually you just go through some cave or tomb and at the end theres a big monster type guy that you do the same thing, just hold your health potion and try to outheal his damage while constantly wailing on him, not much strategy. Maybe sometimes youll have to kite for a few seconsd but thats about it. Most of the game youre kind of just walking around the same looking open fields trying to find where the main quest wants you to go because like I said previously theres so little direction youre kinda just aimlessly navigating. The game is just uneventful, really. Other ARPGS youre like constantly seeing all sorts of new shit, like Diablo you go through Churches, crypts, catacombs, you fight a Blood Raven unique boss, you open up a portal to this destroyed village of Tristram with these unforgettable lightning stones,  you save Cain, you fight the Butcher, you fight Andarial - ALL within Act 1. Titan Quest just has nothing happening in the entire game in comparison. Its monotonous strolls through field after field after field of copy pasted enemy groups and occasional caves and passages, thats like all that happens in the entire game. Theres barely any cool scripted events or cutscenes or anything. ALL of the npc's and dialogue are completely boring and uninspiring. Its sad, really. They had a formula for a really exciting game but the actual pacing and core MISSION design they did nothing with!

Theres a decent amount of enemy variety that keeps the combat interesting and some of them have their own unqiue mechanics and interactions. Theres beasts, Undead, insectoids, Demons, Fantasy characters, Plant enemies, all sorts of things youll encounter that are one of the only things that keep the pacing alive. It takes a long time to even complete one quest, further adding to the repetitive slog feeling of the game. Just to finish one main quest takes like atleast 2-4 hours, it just makes you feel like you arent making progress most of the time.  All of the maps are way too big with too much filler in between. If the whole map was cut in half and shortened vertically and every open area was smaller the game would have been much more exciting, theres too much filler that makes it feel like you can play for ages without really doing anything of substance.

 It's hard to play this game for more than 2 hours without feeling sleepy or just completely bored because its so uneventful. The original 2006 game has 3 acts, each one takes around 8 hours to complete, and you can barely remember anything from any of the acts because it feels like nothing really happens. The entire game is kind of this long marathon sprint towards the North of the map to unlock the next waypoint with a few forgettable sponge bosses in between. The fact that I can only remember that Act 1 takes place in Greece, and totally forget where the other acts took place goes to show how little difference and how unmemorable they are. Act 2 is like full of more desert plains a few tombs, its Egypt. Act 3  is easily the best act because it actually has memorable variety. It's a lot of these city siege type areas and also you go through an entire Winter area which was a very welcome change of pace, then at one point you're like crawling through the depths of hell fighting multiple memorable end game bosses. At one point you go through these swirly open-air hallway like Castle siege areas that really show off the isometric perspective that was cool. If the whole game was more like Act 3 it would of been better paced and more eventful but sadly it isnt. Act 3 has some surprising turn of events where suddenly youre dealing with all sorts of Chinese folklore and NPC's which I did not see coming and I didn't really like but atleast it was different.

I wasn't that into the whole Greek Mythology thing from the beginning anyways though. I think the more medevial, evil dark fantasy vibe of other ARPG is alot more interesting so I'm not even into the whole premise of the game in the first place, and I think they could of done more with it to standout and be more memorable. I don't know why they couldn't really design engaging quests and objectives and instead opted to just do the same copy pasted open grassy field for hours on end, its a real shame. Still, I think the game is among the classic ARPGs that is worth a play for any fan of the genre, the combat is mostly satsifying, the skilltrees are fun to experiment with and work around, its a great co-op game, the items are satisfying and youre always looking forward to more drops and your next level up, its got enough complex but intuitive mechanics to keep you interested in all the RPG mechanics of the game, just its fatal flaw is bad pacing and generally uneventful quests and mission design.  The game took us 20 hours to complete and most of it was just wandering through the same open grassy fields with waves of copy paste enemies.
We played the Anniversary Edition, which couples a lot of the expansion Immortal Throne into the base game, but otherwise seems to not change too much of the default experience, just some bug fixes and modern compatibility and some re-balance of the skill tree. The game felt well balanced overall and I'm glad it allows the player to get through it blind without following guides and still have a goo d time. We even skipped most of the side quests just because we wanted to make progress in the main quest much more, as long as you almost full clear each area you wont be underleveled, which I appreciated as a viable option. I'm not sure exactly what the new additions of the expansion were besides the Act 4, but I think the whole Charms items and Relics etc are a part of that. We stopped playing the game right after Act 3, because thats when the original 2006 game ends. Maybe we will come back and finish the exclusive Immortal Throne act 4 expansion, but for now I've had my fill. I can only hope that the expansion has more eventful mission design and more engaging pacing overall, but thats for another time.

7/10